Edited for the AJF website
Reprinted courtesy of Andrea Wagner (curator)

The “Golden Clogs, Dutch Mountains” exhibition was initiated by the Velvet da Vinci Gallery, which was also the first venue for the exhibition, and is now traveling to five other galleries in the U.S. and Canada.

I’m curator of Golden Clogs, Dutch Mountains as well as a studio jeweller in Amsterdam

For Golden Clogs, Dutch Mountains I chose artists who have graduated and emerged within roughly the last twelve years. I wanted to present strong innovative work that communicates with powerful visual language. My choice also went out for work in which material itself conveys the story, work that consciously uses the emotional value of materiality.

It may not be quite as well-known to a larger public as its bigger (design) sibling, but contemporary jewelry from the Netherlands has and is continually, making a name for itself internationally.

Now, jewelry today isn’t pared down to quite the same extent, but it definitely shares the same mentality of not becoming cluttered. Because jewelry’s intrinsic nature is adornment, this obviously automatically invites a much wider and more thorough use of materials. Dutch jewelry artists, though, tend to make very conscious choices in order to prevent, as it were, the sort of detracting - what I’d describe as visual background noise — that a piece would exude if the maker would just go on an uncontrolled decoration binge. So it’s mainly about making clear decisions, decisions on which material and technique would be the strongest in transmitting a story or concept. Actually a kind of “Less is more” attitude.

It was only pretty much in the later stages of compiling this lecture that I realized something interesting to an extent that I hadn’t quite expected. There is one very outstanding factor in which this generation differs strongly from the ones before. It’s the proof of fading geographical boundaries. Many of the artists in this exhibit aren’t originally Dutch.

So I suppose this automatically raises the question: are we still talking about Dutch jewelry design here or not?

Of course, it must be taken into consideration that - with one single exception - all of these artists had their academic studies at the Amsterdam (Gerrit) Rietveld Academy, and with that training does come a certain kind of design mentality.

These artists now live and work in the Netherlands contributing towards some of the most interesting work that Dutch avantgarde jewelry design has to offer today, and I strongly believe that this has even given the field additional exiting impulses.

It will certainly be interesting to see what this melting-pot of cultural influences continually converging with the Dutch mentality shall be opening up to in the future!

And now, the actual participants of GOLDEN CLOGS, DUTCH MOUNTAINS:

Iris Eichenberg - German-born graduated 1994:

In 2000 she took over as head of the Rietveld Academy Jewelry Dept. after Ruudt Peters, and is now currently head of dept. at Cranbrook/Michigan.
She had already trained to become a nurse when she arrived in Amsterdam to study jewelry.Her work in the past has been a lot about the body and its various systems and processes - like in her “Hearts”. There was a whole pile of them in her graduation show, having all been knit by different women and sometimes using their own red wool. That gave the hearts a variation of interesting personalities in texture and colorations of red.

In recent years her themes have moved towards another area - that of kinship relations.
Her series “Heimat” - an untranslatable German word for place of origin, place of birth, home - a kind of symbolic realm that also bears a certain amount of longing. It’s looking back to her childhood memories of growing up in a German landscape. The typical building style with timbers, or the layout of the landscape, people in that past - all influence the materialization of the series.

Regarding the myriads of materials that Iris uses - it’s actually easier to ask what she hasn’t used, and the answer to that will probably be the shorter one. Amongst other techniques she sews and stitches through just about anything - rubber, plastics, textile, leather, wood, bone.

Jantje Fleischhut - German-born / graduated 2002:

Her fascination for plastic originally began with some intriguingly interesting thrown-away pieces of plastic trash and continued to evolve into her wonderfully colored and partly translucent sturdy light elements that are self-constructed of fiberglass and epoxy resin as we see here in this brooch from her series “Neighborhood”.

Her pieces from the series “We Are All Space Travellers” seem to suggest to us that they are technical articles for daily use. They are like prosthesis or navigational aides for encounters and recognizing.

Interesting is that the attachment pins in Jantje’s brooches are hidden away in little silver stopper tops, so that when the piece is worn the little stopper can either be fastened from behind your clothing or through a fold of the fabric on the front.

Gésine Hackenberg - German-born graduated 2001:

A little ice-cream stick covered in Japanese Urushi laquer is worn with a separate pin as brooch. Her theme is the use of things in daily life and about belongings - jewelry and commodities, such as household and kitchen utensils. For example her graduation series was about spoons. Ultimately, her work is about personal preciousness. A gingham necklace seems to celebrate the simple everyday actions in one’s own personal living realm.

Besides textile, she has especially been using the extremely tough Japanese Urushi lacquer. This technique of is incredibly time- consuming. With it she makes sturdy hollow elements that are very lightweight. The shapes of both the laquer and silver elements are borrowed from kitchen objects, plastic joghurt containers, and other packaging. The silver parts were made by paint layering the inside of the original plastic elements for more thickness and directly casting them.

Her work is her manner of rendering and preserving the picture of the homely but slowly vanishing household-table-and-meals culture.

Ineke Heerkens - Dutch graduated 2001:

“A naked body jumping into the water creates a space around itself, a Waterhole.
At the very same moment the water becomes the body’s jacket…”

This Waterhole idea serves as Ineke’s personal metaphor representing the negative space that would be created with movements occurring in water. It’s her basis and recurrent theme in working. She starts out by making drawings of movements as in a Waterhole. These are then transferred onto flexible materials such as silk-screened textile or leather - like “Lily” here, made from leather with a thick layer of silk-screen ink and formed into shape in a heat process.

Once the drawings have been transferred onto the material they subsequently serve as
cutting patterns. These are then moulded and formed into organic, 3D forms.

Stephanie Jendis - German-born graduated 1999:

Starting point for her are classical jewels and the notion of preciousness and personal value. She connects the contrasts of natural and artificially manufactured materials, and combines known jewellery forms with unusual materials into hybrids. She often uses her own manner of faceting materials such as wood or the so-called reconstructed materials into her own gem forms. Reconstructed materials are made from the cutting dust of usually semi-precious stones or, for example, coral and then together with a binding agent compacted into easily workable slabs or blocks.

It’s about establishing another kind of harmony than the known in supposedly known objects. By adding something to a beautiful old piece of wood or plastic it turns into a little treasure of increased personal value. For Stephanie a piece of jewelry must have presence and attract attention; the jewel being about the personality of the wearer, should be individual and often have humor.

Manon van Kouswijk - Dutch graduated 1995:

As inspiration she focuses on everyday objects and archetypical forms. Her scope of work and starting points include things like the silver spoon, the white table cloth, and stationery. Jewelry is but a part of her work, and in that area it is the archetypes like the pearl or bead necklace that she comments on or makes visible certain aspects around the wearing of jewels - as in her neckpiece here titled “Once”, suggesting a classical pearl necklace but having been knotted without the pearls. To me it also seems to suggest memories faded away completely and lost.

Iris Nieuwenburg - Dutch graduated 2002:

As a little girl she had always been fascinated by dressing-up. Here she is playing on the tradition of the folkloristic. The ladies on these brooches are wearing the typical traditional Zeeland headdress ; this is the original version of the Zeeland headjewel - it’s those weird square plates of gold sticking out on either side of these ladies’ foreheads that look like rear-view mirrors.

Memories exist out of time, are unique, valuable, + irreplacable. With her work she tries to make a combination between valuable memories and valuable jewelry, while preserving the admiration of the jewel as well as the memory. Her work is a play on traditional classic jewelry such as diamond encrusted brooches or awards and trophies.

Iris has perfected her own technique of lacquer work that gives the pieces an enamel-like appearance. To make her assemblages she creates combinations with old motifs from antique Victorian picture paper or postcards, together with old ornaments, medallions, doll house things, her Grandmother’s jewelry, children’s toys, old teaspoons, antique carved flowers, mother-of-pearl buttons. She cuts up the element and images, rearranges and reassembles them with traditional goldsmithing techniques.

Katja Prins - Dutch graduated 1997:

She works around the intimate relationship with the body as in a necklace with flexible hollow latex rubber elements from her graduation series; the little lumps on the chain are pearls covered by the latex slathered onto it, or as in a brooch from a couple of years later, using silk cocoons and latex.

Later she further extends and incorporates the relationship aspect with medical or technical devices. You could say she tells stories about the body as an instrument or machine, about instruments and machines as extensions of the body, and the manipulation of our bodies as something that can be changed and sculpted. She sees our body as being an extension of the mind that is always in relationship with its surroundings and the environment.

Not being too specific about her work she wants people to discover their own stories in the work and interpret them in their own way.

Constanze Schreiber - German-born graduated 2004:

Her work inspiration is based on human needs and longings, the idea of how we deal with our fears in attempting to create stability. In her anchor piece the anchor stands for the common symbol for hope - and as the fragile blue coral suggests - all attempts to invoke that feeling of stability outside of ourselves through rituals or other things, don’t really help.

She made a whole series of brooches and neckpieces of recycled fur in varying outline forms of classical jewels that she has generously filled with lead, so that their weight makes us aware of the animal it once was.

Her interest in the rich history of antique jewelry guides her in her focus on the symbolism inherent in antique jewelry around essential themes as love, life, and death.

Francis Willemstijn - Dutch graduated 2004:

Francis shows her connection with Dutch history and her love of that heritage. Her work is like little depictions of that period, a period whose traces may soon have disappeared completely. She resurrects those glorious times in which this tiny country was a naval power, engaged in conquest and incredible sea battles. It’s about Holland’s shipping history in the 17th century - the Dutch “Golden Century” , about traditional costumes and jewelry, as well as the old customs.

Francis imbibes poorer materials with value through the time and energy consuming work of hand-crafting, which is her reaction to the hasty consumer oriented society in which traditions are rapidly fading away.

The name of the Brooch “Madder” is also the name for the dye that comes from the meekrap plant that was grown in Zeeland for a long time. Its raw dye extract had the typical red-brown color as in this brooch, but in combination with other ingredients it produced the typical bright red known from Dutch textiles. In the brooch Francis used a. o. enamel and little raw garnets.

Last of all - myself - German/Canadian backgr. / grad. 1997:

I’m fascinated by ambiguity and irony.

I’m also especially intrigued by the intricacies of interaction, of communication, or of living itself. My series “Wonderbliss” with erotic and ironic undertones is based on my fascination with imperfections and how longings are often expressed through subtle implication and often with a good portion of insecurity. I suppose that having lived in three Western cultures has tuned me into this and sharpened my perception for such themes. It’s unimaginable just how many subtle nuances there are in communication and gestures, differing even from one Western culture to the other. The use of self-made and dyed wool felt in this series, in some pieces even richly embroidered, was meant to convey a certain seductive warmth and simultaneously a homey or awkward feeling through its hairiness.

The things that inspire me invariably tend to percolate into different scenarios in my mind and then become reflected in the atmosphere of my work. I always hope that viewers pick up on the spirit of the work but ultimately discover their own similar line of interpretation in it.

In recent years, I have chosen pristine, hard bone china porcelain. I needed a way to cast multiple thin and intricate shapes. Mould-making for the normal porcelain casting method would have been far too time-consuming and limited for such forms. This got me started on trying out to layer the fluid porcelain slip onto combustible moulds. That gave me individual and different shapes with an interesting grainy structure. This layering technique also turned out to be ideal for achieving color effects in the material itself through differently colored layers.
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Today, precisely 4 decades later, the appearance of Dutch jewelry has come a long way from the cool and reductivist style that made it reputable then; and in all of its manifold styles and appearances it still has a compelling presence. Its appearance testifies to originality and inventiveness. Not quite as sober as the larger field of Dutch Design in general due to all its material richness - it does have with it in common the to-the-point tendency regarding choices made. it’s all about the pieces’ inherent personal power of emanation. It’s what they insinuate or what they tell us.

Preciousness or non-preciousness isn’t really the issue anymore, either. The challenge is about telling a story in strong visual language. It’s about conveying the conceptual atmosphere by using the emotional value of the material in the work. Materiality is a force that shouldn’t be underestimated . Different materials aren’t just interesting to look at. They all have a communicative vocabulary and emotive value.

Quite a number of artists tend to treat non-typical jewelry materials as if they were just as important and valuable as any metal working technique. That’s why they investigate them so seriously. It’s this dedicated concentration, the extensive researching and experimenting that pays off with surprising effects that very often only revealed themselves during that process. All this in the end resulting in a personalized perfection, giving the jewel the power to communicate and transport its story.